Friend has a Samsung i3 laptop, CPU idle temps run about 70c... is this safe?

[Michelle Beth]

Hi everyone. I was looking at my friend's laptop and fixing a few things, and installed realtemp and speedfan. My friend has a Samsung dual core i3 windows 7 laptop, with 8gb of RAM.

I noticed the idle CPU temps for both cores tend to hover around 70c. Also, speedfan cannot detect any fans (I went to try to configure it).

Any ideas? Thanks!
Michelle

 

[volcanoscout]

Idle at 70C is pretty high - I imagine the fan or fans are going at full speed all the time?

First thing I would do is give a thorough cleaning - remove the back plate and use canned air and a vacuum hose to clear out as much dust as possible. Use a q-tip to get the hard-to-reach places. Pay special attention to the heat-sink cooling fins, the fan intake filters and fan blades.

If that doesn't cool it down sufficiently, it may need a reapplication of thermal paste. The stock thermal paste applications for OEM laptops usually suck any way, and if it's more than two or three years old, it's probably overdue.